Kofi Annan has said “Good governance is perhaps the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development”

Though, it is more from the context of UN, to which he is holding the position, but isn't it true for other organisation as well?

Governance is the exercise of economic and administrative authority to manage a organisation's affairs at all levels. It consists of the mechanisms, processes and institutions of the organisation.

There are different reasons for reforms and restructuring activities and since I have been involved in large scale reforms activities, I would like to put down my thoughts here on the subject. Hope the readers would find it useful.

Need for Reforms (some of the points below may be over lapping with each-other, but each has its own importance)

- Increased administrative efficiency - eliminating unnecessary administrative work, paper workd and shifting the emphasis on speedier and informed decision making

- Increased efficiency - as mentioned above, faster decsions, faster processing and efficient processes

- Effective Decision making - Faster clearance, decisions, processing....the emphasis is on avoiding unnecessary delay in files processing

- Lowering cost - faster decisons and increased efficiency will result in lowering cost. Futher, the reforms may involve financial compononet as well for reforms and that can also help in lowering costs.

- Increase employee satisfaction - Though this is not understood very well and ignored most of the times, it is an important part of Reforms excercise. Surprisingly, this can be many of the times, be the trigger for the reforms.

Generally, Reforms and Restructuring excercise are carried out with the help of experts or consultants. (Not saying as I am a Government Reforms consultant ...but its the fact). Consultant and experts would have similar work in different context and they would be in better position to relate their other experience to the organisation's reforms and restructuring context. This helps in extracting the best of the previous experiences and eliminating the previous errors in the exercise.

I hope, this would be a useful read. In next sequal, I might be coming up with steps involved in reforms.

If anybody has any view on this, please respond to this article with your comments.

Regards,

Mehul Pandya